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Princess Nicketti

Princess Nicketti is the name given to a Virginia Indian woman believed by
some to have been the daughter of Opechancanough, a leader of the Powhatan Indians and the brother of the paramount chief Powhatan. While the name has been referenced almost exclusively
on twenty-first-century genealogy websites by people claiming family relationship, no
scholarly evidence exists that Princess Nicketti ever lived. A careful search of
seventeenth-century records in Virginia yields no one by that name, male or female. And no
name of a child of Opechancanough was ever recorded in that century. The writings about
her stem from a single published source: Alexander Brown's genealogy The
Cabells and Their Kin (1939). Significantly, Brown calls Nicketti's story only a
"very interesting tradition" and adds, "I cannot vouch for it[s accuracy]," but he had
heard about her from several prominent Piedmont Virginia families. Subsequent writers have
quoted Brown's text as fact. MORE...

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Another problem with the Princess Nicketti legend is that North American Indian tribes
did not have princesses in the European sense. Most tribes were relatively egalitarian,
and egalitarian societies do not produce aristocracies. Even the more hierarchical Indian
cultures, such as the Powhatan, did not have European-style royalty. For one thing, there
was not that great a distance between a paramount chief like Powhatan and the ordinary
people, which is why anthropologists have traditionally referred to Powhatan as a chief, not as a king.
For another, most Woodland Indian cultures (including the Powhatan one) practiced
matrilineal inheritance, at least for ruling positions. That meant that a male chief's
sons were not his heirs, and his daughters' social prominence would last only until he
died. The real heirs were the children of a female chief, or the elder sister of a male
one.

Despite the evidence against Princess Nicketti's
existence, she remains a popular figure, especially among those interested in family
history. As evidenced by the numerous claims of relation to Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, and to the privileges granted
those alleged relations in the Racial
Integrity Acts, Virginians have long valued connections, real or mythological, to
Indian "royalty." Those connections have most often been made through women, who likely
are seen as less threatening than males like Opechancanough, for instance, who led Second Anglo-Powhatan War
(1622-1632). Claims of ancestry through the Powhatan Indians are more common, as well,
probably because it was an especially well-known tribe.

The American Indian author Vine Deloria has argued that Americans seek family connections
to Indians in order to relate in a more personal way to the frontier and, perhaps, to
expiate guilt related to the treatment of American Indians. Others have pointed out that
during parts of the twentieth century claims of Indian ancestry sometimes exempted people
from laws that segregated whites from nonwhites. For instance, in Virginia the Racial
Integrity Acts, passed in the 1920s, outlawed marriage between whites and nonwhites (the
latter classification included Virginia Indians, who state officials believed to be black)
and required that people's racial statuses be recorded at birth; elite Virginians who
claimed ancestry to Pocahontas, however, could still register as white.

"Nicketti" is not an identifiable Indian name, and is probably a corruption of some other
name. It could be derived from "Necotowance," the former name of a creek in King William County, taken in turn
from the personal name of Opechancanough's male successor. Nothing is known about that man
except that he signed the Treaty of
1646 on behalf of many of the Powhatan tribes. He disappeared from the English
records after 1649.

Contributed by Helen C. Rountree, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Old Dominion University, and author of Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four
Centuries (1990) and Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough:
Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (2005).